Popular culture has surely produced no more satiric a view of that great scourge of public progress, the Apathetic Teacher, than last year’s bluntly titled comedy “Bad Teacher.” In the film, Cameron Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a junior high school teacher so incompetent and chemically regulated that she shows movies all day, barely registers one student’s slapping another with coleslaw and steals the answers to a state-administered exam. A bonus of $5,700 is to be given to the teacher whose students score highest on the test, and Halsey pursues it to pay for her adventures in plastic surgery. Perhaps you watched the movie wondering whether it had been subsidized by a political action committee aimed at dismantling the teachers’ union.

Regarding teachers’ unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process — with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake — they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state’s teachers’ unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can’t handle. As the governor put it on Monday, “Our schools are not an employment program.”

Charlotte Danielson, an economist, developed a method for evaluating teachers that has generated a great deal of consensus.Credit
Matt Rainey for The New York Times

The history unfolds as follows: In 2010, the state passed a law requiring school districts to institute new teacher evaluation systems to replace the thumbs-up-thumbs-down, Siskel & Ebert model that previously prevailed. The new system would tie 40 percent of a teacher’s rating to standardized test scores and 60 percent to observations of the teacher in class.

Keeping the new assessment protocols from operating right now — something the mayor and governor seem so desperately to want — are not vast differences in philosophy but nagging disagreements over bureaucratic implementation: at the city level, a dispute between the United Federation and the Department of Education over how appeals of poor teacher ratings might be arbitrated, and at the state level, a lawsuit filed by the union against the Board of Regents for pushing the 2010 law beyond its intent. A decision handed down last summer in State Supreme Court in Albany sided largely with labor, but the state chose to pursue the time-depleting course of an appeal nevertheless.

Where a great deal of consensus lies is around the ideas of a woman named Charlotte Danielson, who 16 years ago created a method for evaluating teachers that judges them according to four domains, each with numerous categories and subcategories: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students’ special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher’s involvement in professional development activities. The section for assessing the strength of the classroom-learning environment has 15 criteria — down to the placement of furniture.

Ms. Danielson’s program, which also trains principals in how to properly execute the evaluations, is already being used in several states and on a pilot basis in 140 New York City schools (though in the experimental phase the outcomes will have no consequence). In November, a study out of the University of Chicago that looked at Ms. Danielson’s method as it was practiced in Chicago schools determined that it was not only a considerable improvement over an old evaluation system but that, just as significant, it established a shared definition of what good teaching was.

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Cameron Diaz in the film “Bad Teacher.”Credit
Gemma LaMana/Columbia Pictures

Ms. Danielson, who runs her own educational consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., is perfectly suited to appeal to potentially opposing sides in the debates about education reform. As an Oxford-trained economist, she thinks both entrepreneurially and progressively. In the late 1960s she gave up research stints at the Council of Economic Advisers and the Brookings Institution to work as a teacher in Washington’s ailing public school system.

“If all you do is judge teachers by test results,” she told me when I visited her this week, “it doesn’t tell you what you should do differently.”

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, speaks about Ms. Danielson almost as though he were producing an infomercial for her. “I taught for 13 years, and I would have loved to have been trained in this method,” he said. “I have no doubt it would have made me a better teacher.” And yet he, too, is capable of the kind of retaliatory small-mindedness that so often halts the momentum of winning ideas. So offended was he by the mayor’s “obnoxious” attitude toward the union in his State of the City address that Mr. Mulgrew disinvited the Education Department from sessions in which principals were being trained in Ms. Danielson’s methods.

While the intensity around evaluation reform is ultimately a very good thing, it sidesteps something crucial: that we can’t attract the best and the brightest teachers without drastically changing the status of the profession. Paying good teachers more is important — and the mayor, admirably, has committed to doing that — but money isn’t solely at issue. Each year hundreds of intelligent people in their 20s move to apartments in Astoria and lofts in Greenpoint with their degrees from Oberlin and Brown and the University of Michigan to pursue glamorous work that often pays excruciatingly little — assisting documentary filmmakers, assisting assistants at prestigious magazines. Some of their friends may go to Teach for America, but many of them will do their two years and move on.

Maybe what teaching needs is a new movie that makes it seem as hot as Condé Nast.

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2012, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Petty Differences Mask Consensus on Teachers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe